Abstract

The Dell PowerEdge C6615 has set a new VMmark 3 world record. This result is the world’s highest power-performance score achieved on VMmark 3 using vSAN storage. This configuration also achieved the highest 4-node server power-performance score and the highest server-storage power-performance score. All of these records illustrate the sheer efficiency, scalability, and performance-density of the C6615 modular platform.

This document summarizes the VMmark 3 benchmark results for the PowerEdge C6615 published on 1/23/2024. It lists the results, summarizes the major configuration details, and links to the results on the VMmark website.

Benchmark results

• Performance Score: 17.42 @ 16tiles 
• Server Power-Performance: 18.2000 @ 16 tiles
• Server Storage Power-Performance: 11.0600 @ 16 tiles

What do these scores mean?

The following world records were achieved:

• highest power-performance score achieved on VMMark 3 using vSAN storage.
• highest 4-node server power-performance score
• highest server-storage power-performance score

The Dell PowerEdge C6615 is a modular server node in the C6600 chassis with the AMD 4^th Gen EPYC 8004 series of processors. This configuration allows for four 1-S nodes in a single 2U chassis, enabling high performance density and power efficiency, especially when using local storage for vSAN.

The configuration also leveraged the latest 96GB DDR5 DIMMs that offer exceptional value and capacity for a variety of use cases.

These results showcase the great performance density, power efficiency, and scalability of the Dell PowerEdge C6615 servers for virtualization use cases. VMmark is a benchmark standard for today’s virtualized applications in the datacenter.

Notes

• Results referenced are current as of April 3^rd. 2024.
• To view all VMmark 3 results, see VMmark 3.x Results (vmware.com).
• This benchmark was run by Dell in the Dell SPA lab and audited by VMware.

Key configuration details

We used 4x Dell PowerEdge C6615 server nodes in a single C6600 chassis.

Each node had the following configuration:

• 1x AMD EPYC 8534P 64 core processors at 2.3GHz (AMD EPYC 8534P | AMD)
• 6x 96 GB Dual Rank x4 DDR5 4800MT/s RDIMM (576GB total)
• Dell Customized Image of VMware ESXi 8.0 U2, Build 22380479
• VMware vCenter Server 8.0 U2a
• Boot Storage: Dell EC NVMe ISE 7400 RI M.2 960GB
• vSAN Storage:

• 1x Disk Group per Host
• 4x Dell Ent NVMe v2 AGN MU U.2 6.4TB

• Networking:

• 1x Mellanox CX-6 Dx Dual Port 100GbE QSFP56 Adapter
• 1x Broadcom Advanced Dual 25Gb Ethernet Adapter

About the Dell PowerEdge C6615

The Dell PowerEdge C6615 node with AMD EPYC 8004 series of processors is designed to maximize value and minimize TCO for scale-out workloads, using a scalable dense compute infrastructure focused on performance per watt, per dollar.

Some of the key features include:

• AMD 4th Gen EPYC up to 64 cores/CPU
• Single-socket only
• Enables DDR5 at 4800 MT/s memory and PCIe Gen5 with double the speed of previous PCIe Gen4 for faster access and transport of data, to optimize application output
• Fully featured systems management with iDRAC, and OpenManage Enterprise, and CloudIQ

These features allow you to maximize security with the PowerEdge Cyber Resilient Architecture.

Figure 1.  The PowerEdge C6615 sled and the PowerEdge C6600 chassis

What is VMmark 3.0?

VMmark is a free tool used by hardware vendors and others to measure the performance, scalability, and power consumption of virtualization platforms.

Figure 2.  Outline of the VMmark benchmark components

The VMmark benchmark combines commonly-virtualized applications into predefined bundles called "tiles". This version of the benchmark has 19 unique virtual machines per tile. The number of VMmark tiles a virtualization platform can run, as well as the cumulative performance of those tiles and of a variety of platform-level workloads, determine the VMmark 3 score.

References

• For details about VMmark, see VMmark (vmware.com).
• PowerEdge C6615 Server Node